By Sarah Donoghue
A few weeks ago, in the throes of exam season, I was studying with third year neuroscience student in UCD, Kriti. After a long silent stretch, Kriti turned to me and asked “have you ever seen a homunculus?” She then went on to show me this little guy.
To the best of my understanding, a homunculus in science is a model of a person with the body parts scaled based on how much motor or sensory processing they take up in the brain. Both the motor and sensory homunculus have huge hands, lips, and tongues but there’s some difference between them with the motor having skinnier legs and arms and no ears compared the the sensory homunculus’ pretty large ears.
After laughing for a while our attention turned to the cartoonish genitalia which is when I asked, “what does the female one look like?” But she’d never seen, or been taught, a female homunculus. I googled it straight away and turns out there is a female homunculus, and it looks completely different to the male one.
This is a small and pretty insignificant example of misogyny in education, but it’s indicative of a much larger problem that permeates third level education and most research fields.
We talk a lot about gender bias in medicine, many put this down to sexist male doctors purposefully dismissing women’s pain and concerns. This is a huge issue in medicine, a 2024 study published by the Australian Government’s Department of Health found that 2 in 3 Australian women had experienced this type of explicit medical misogyny. But gender bias in medicine also takes the form of doctors’ ignorance to female issues, conditions that primarily affect women and ways that conditions may affect women differently to men.
This starts in education, for a long time getting more women into universities and male dominated fields has been hailed as the solution many forms of misogyny we see. But that’s already happened. According to the CSO, as of 2023, 52% of women aged 15-64 have a degree compared to 44% of men. For neuroscience specifically, in the USA, 57% of PhD students are women but here in Ireland our top-rated university for science isn’t teaching female biology to the same degree they’re teaching male biology.
The female homunculus itself was only developed in 2021, when art student, Haven Wright, who was taking a psychology elective in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga was inspired when her lecturer, Preston Foerder, told the class there isn’t a female homunculus. Wright set about making a mock up female homunculus sculpture for her final project, upon realising the importance of her work, Foerder teamed up with Wright to ensure her model was accurate.
The homunculus was first created in 1937, and it took 85 years for anyone to think to develop a female one, and it was an art student. This happens all the time, it’s up to female students and academics to make up to the short falls of their education and educators. There are so many young professionals trying to fill the gap of gender bias in education but when they do it it’s still not being widely taught. Because of this the problems gender bias causes, like medical misogyny, persist.
At the end of the day, the homunculus doesn’t matter that much. But it’s representative of a culture of gender bias in academia. Syllabuses need to be updated to be inclusive of both sexes to begin to tackle the gender bias problem in science and academia